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By Root 407 0

Put out a speed warning and bring Bolivar by zoomer. I gonna cone hard and try.” Erzulia did not watch to see if she was obeyed but sat on the cot’s edge and took Sappho’s fragile head in her long-fingered black hands. Erzulia’s hair was put up in dozens of narrow braids woven into a beehive on her high-domed head. She dressed in a long folded-over skirt of a blue cloth batiked into a pattern of snakes and flowers, leaving her breasts and lithe powerful shoulders bare. Her large eyes glazed over as she grasped Sappho and sweat started out on her broad forehead. Still, rigid, she sat with Sappho’s head clasped in her fingers. Sweat broke out and trickled past her cheeks and sweat ran over her conical outpointing breasts, sweat rose from her in a heat shimmer as if from the body of a long-distance runner.

Luciente spoke softly to her kenner. “Bee, you should come to the tent. Erzulia holds Sappho by mind lock till Bolivar comes.”

Bee’s voice said, “Can’t come now. In the middle of a test run. I’ll set my kenner for alert when Bolivar lands and run all the way.”

“Watch out, then! Bolivar always overschedules. To do too much oneself all the time is a kind of arrogance. That’s why person is late again.”

“Luciente! If person were early, you’d read arrogance into that, Bolivar thinking Sappho could not die without per. Till when.”

“It all seems … funny to me,” Connie said. “A bunch of amateurs.”

“Who’s professional at dying? We each get only one turn, no practice.” Luciente put an arm around her waist.

“In my family in Mexico, people died this way. But in the city poor people die in hospitals. The attendants put up a screen. The nurse keeps an eye on you if she isn’t too hassled … . My mother died in the hospital in Chicago … so scared. Before when she was in the hospital, they took out her womb.”

“We don’t do much taking out. When we do, we regrow. We program the local cells. Slow healing but better after.”

“I haven’t met any doctors. How come there’s no doctor?”

Luciente pointed. “Look! Erzulia is a healer.”

“A witch doctor!”

“You mean that as an insult? Erzulia works in the hospital in Cranberry. They have the hospital for this township.”

“What does she do in the hospital?”

“Oh, person teaches people to heal themselves. Does surgery. Manipulating, pain easing, bone knitting. Erzulia’s skilled! Person has trained hundreds of healers and pioneered new methods of bone knitting and pain easing. There’s a way of setting pelvic fractures in the aged named after per.”

She looked at the tall black woman sitting cross-legged on the cot with sweat pouring down her muscular arms and big breasts and she could not see her as a doctor in a white coat in a big hospital. “How can anybody be into voodoo and medicine? It doesn’t make sense!”

“Each makes a different kind of sense, no? How not?”

She was lying in bed with the doctor going rounds and cracking jokes for the amusement of his residents over the bodies of the women patients, mostly black and Puerto Rican, whom some female troubles had cast up on this hard white beach, this glaring sterile reef. They were handed releases to sign, carefully vague so that the residents could get practice in the operations they needed. In the bed next to her was a nineteen-year-old black woman on welfare who had been admitted for an abortion in the fourteenth week and been given a hysterectomy instead of a saline abortion. The woman had gone into withdrawal shock, which made her a quiet patient. Nobody bothered about her as she stared at the ceiling. The women with syphilis were treated to obscene jokes. All the doctors ever said to any complaint was, “We’re giving you some medicine that will take care of that.” They did pelvics and rectals seven or eight times in a row on interesting cases, so all the doctors and residents could get a look, all the time explaining nothing. “You’re a very sick little girl,” the doctor said to a forty-year-old woman whose intestines they had accidentally perforated in removing an embedded IUD.

Anger began to blur the scene and she moved closer to Luciente